Wu Zetian: Hated by Gods and Men - Chinese History - Part 1 - Extra History

Chang An China, 684 CE. Dowager Empress Wu orders the nervous messenger to read the letter aloud before the entire court. It's from a poet who has joined a rebellion against her. It describes and denounces Wu. It details how she rose from a low-level concubine to be the power behind the imperial throne, ruling through a series of puppet emperors. "She used her fox-like charms to delude the emperor," he reads. "She finally was able to put on an empress's clothes and put our emperor in a position of committing incest." She nods for him to continue. He does, shaking. "She has a heart like a snake and a lizard and a disposition similar to a wolf. She is close to insidious individuals and murders the faithful and the good. She killed her sister, slaughtered her brothers, murdered her emperor, and poisoned her mother. Both gods and men hate her and heaven and earth cannot allow her to exist." The throne room falls silent. Wu accepts the letter, scanning it. Then, she laughs and turning to her advisers, shoots them a look. "This is your fault," she says, waving the letter. "You should have hired him to work for us." Thanks so much to GiveWell for helping everyone find highly effective charities and making sure our donation dollars go further. Empress Wu Zetian, or Wu Zhao to use the name she called herself, is one of the most fascinating and dramatic characters in world history. Entering the imperial court as a 14-year-old concubine, she began a meteoric rise through the ranks of the emperor's harem to capture the heart of the man's heir and rule as co-monarch through a series of weak emperors. There, she served as a stable force amid changeable and often incompetent rulers, steering the Tang Dynasty through the period of its greatest glory. Her administrative reforms and sponsorship of the new foreign religion of Buddhism, permanently changed China and helped the dynasty endure another 200 years after her death. But her greatest achievement, what makes her so notable, is that she is the only woman in history to rule China not as a regent or through a weak monarch, but under her own name. And this was so unprecedented that there's actually no word for the role she took. See, the Chinese word for empress just means the emperor's wife.